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Monday, October 14, 2013

#750: John Hawkins

John Hawkins is a wingnut loon and global warming denialist most
famous for running the website Right Wing News and regularly contributing screeds
to various rightwing outlets, including Townhall and PJ Media. His global warming denialist tropes are mostly the expected distortions, lies and Gish galloping – as well as the strawmen, of course (some of which are dealt with here).
But then, his political screeds are really much the same. Hawkins rarely argues for anything. Instead he makes lists.
Many of the lists involve attempts to characterize liberals.
For instance, in an attempt to list some main reasons to dislike liberals, Hawkins
pointed out e.g. that “whether you’re talking about cop killers, terrorists,
radical Islamists or dictators, all you have to do is say, ‘I hate America,’ and
liberals start to sympathize with you,” that “liberals think black Americans
are inferior to whites, which is why the worst, most crime-ridden places to
live in America are inevitably run by liberals. That’s acceptable to liberals
because they don’t think black Americans deserve any better,” that “the same
people who voted Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama into office think they're
smarter than tradition, the Founding Fathers and God Himself,” and that “liberals
have been big supporters of slavery, Indian massacres, the KKK, eugenics,
fascism, communism and Jim Crow laws. Then, down the road, after liberals
finally join everyone else, they try to claim that conservatives still support
all the practices that we fought liberals on from the beginning.” (No, he doesn’t
understand “liberal” – any position taken by the Democratic party a hundred
years ago must apparently be liberal because the name of the party taking them
was called “Democratic”).

Here is a list of what he deems to be the 25 most influential conservatives in
America. It can be interpreted as showing more than one thing, but we prefer to
interpret it as Hawkins being a loon rather than something about conservatives
in general.

Diagnosis: Hawkins, the doughty snower, is behind several
virtual (literal?) massacres of strawmen. Now, I am sure strawman bashing is a
cherished pastime on the other side of the political spectrum as well, so send us
some good cases and we’ll cover them. But to bolster his candidacy Hawkins makes
sure to be a staunch denialist as well.